`HIGHWAY' 101 : DIRECTOR LYNCH EXPLAINS HIS NEW MOVIE; NOW, IF WE COULD JUST UNDERSTAND.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Writer

David Lynch titled his new movie ``Lost Highway,'' and that's arguably the only aspect of the film that makes sense. If there was a detailed roadmap to movie meanings, this would not be on it. Or, if it was, it would lead nowhere.

The first film in five years from the master of nightmarish surrealism makes such unsettling works as ``Blue Velvet,'' ``Wild at Heart'' and ``Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me'' seem as simple and straightforward as ``101 Dalmatians.''

Lynch - a pleasant, polite fellow with hair not unlike that of the hero of his first feature, ``Eraserhead'' - is not much help in explaining what's going on in ``Lost Highway.'' The film features a condemned man who is inexplicably replaced by a total stranger in a locked prison cell; a dead woman who is suddenly alive again with a different 'do, name and checkered past; and a gargoylish guy who can call your house from a party and answer your phone at the same time.

These are just a handful of the bizarre events that the director is determined to leave open to each viewer's interpretation.

``I can't really tell you what any of it represents,'' Lynch explains in the workshop of his Hollywood Hills home. ``I'm sorry, but every step of the way, you've got millions of choices. You end up choosing elements, and you work two years to get a film to be a certain way. Then the thing is complete, every single thing is in there, and it can go out.''

Challenge like no other

Lynch claims that his movie makes sense intuitively and emotionally, if not intellectually. His actors tried a little harder to grasp what was going on, with varying degrees of success.

But they liked it. Sort of.

``The whole subterranean level of the story was really great to bite into after `Independence Day,' which was something really broad and that's all about just hitting the lines and letting them register,'' says Bill Pullman, who plays Fred Madison, a troubled jazz musician who isn't sure whether he did or did not kill his wife, Renee. ``This feels like it's more what isn't said that you follow.

``David creates this kind of poetic world where there are a lot of certainties coming from him about what's going on, but it also somehow has a lot of uncertainties around it,'' Pullman continues. ``For me, it's clearly a story about two people who are fated to live out one of those malignant relationships. In a general way, it's about intimacy and betrayal.

``I think of it that way, rather than just being about a sick man,'' Pullman concludes. ``But some people like a more medical reason.''

Patricia Arquette plays Fred's red-haired, distant wife in the first half of the movie. In the second half, she's blond bombshell Alice Wakefield, mistress of mob boss Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia) and temptress of Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty), the teen-age Valley mechanic who inexplicably turned up in Fred's prison cell.

``Unlike most filmmakers that tell you when to laugh, when to cry and fill in all the loose ends so you don't have to do anything, David really wants to have audience participation,'' Arquette says. ``It's almost like deciphering a dream when you wake up, not knowing what it meant.

``But I felt responsible for making some decisions about what the movie's about, so I could make choices,'' she continues. ``One of the things that was very interesting about the material was that it came right after the O.J. Simpson thing. Was he guilty or not guilty, her whole sexual past. So, to me, this movie was about looking at this woman through the eyes of this man who loves her, but who's also a misogynist who hates her.

``I think he kills her and can't even consciously admit to that,'' Arquette reckons, ``because he's so jealous over her. So he re-creates himself as everything he thinks she wants. He's now a mechanic. He's young, he's virile, he can fix things! And he re-creates her as a girl who's in trouble and needs him and desires him. But even in his fantasy of things, things get ugly.''

Open to interpretation

Sounds good to us. But Lynch is not about to accept Arquette's, or anyone else's, interpretation.

``Patricia is a super-intelligent person and very special actress,'' Lynch says. ``I'm sure her take on it is interesting, but I guarantee you, it will be different from other people's takes.''

One thing everyone is sure to agree on, though, is that ``Lost Highway'' contains some of the most disturbing violence and fetishized sexuality of any Lynch film yet - and considering the excesses of ``Blue Velvet'' and ``Wild at Heart,'' that's pretty shocking stuff.

``Instead of being in trouble myself, I like to go into a world where I can see others in trouble and struggling,'' says Lynch, a 51-year-old former Boy Scout who still comes off, in person, like one (he and wife Mary Sweeney, a producer and editor of ``Highway,'' have a 4-year-old son). ``I like to meet these characters, knowing that they're going to get themselves in trouble. It's a story thing, but it has to be based on truthful human behavior, which is a wide band of behavior.

``I don't want to just do something to the audience for the sake of doing it to them,'' adds the man who's made severed ears a kind of cinematic calling card. ``I fall in love with the way these ideas that come to me are, and want to use cinema to translate that. It's not about manipulating. It's about making the experience like it was when it came, through the ideas, to me.''

When it came to filming some of the kinkier nude scenes, however, the experience was a little different for others.

``It was very difficult for me, and I cried a lot making this movie,'' Arquette admits. ``But it was also a safe, warm environment, as dark as the movie is, and even a little bit liberating.

``Obviously, this isn't a movie for children,'' Arquette notes. ``And it's not a movie for adults who want to see some light fare. This is a dark experience, seeing this movie. At different periods of your life, your sexuality feels more vulnerable than at other times. A woman or a man who feels in a sexually vulnerable place should not see this movie, either.''

It might help if you're in an intellectually adventurous mood, too.

``It's like an old Beckett thing I used to do on stage; suddenly you're buried up to your neck in sand, and the whole play is just your head talking,'' Pullman notes. ``That was stuff I trained in and did for a long time; which was good preparation for doing `Casper'! But I'm in my 40s now, and it felt good to get back to something that was interesting to me. Maybe, 'cause I've got my home paid for, I can start to think about that stuff again.''

Nice for Bill. But what in the world will audiences think?

``I'm really glad David did this movie the way he did it,'' Pullman adds. ``It's just such a hard little nugget for people. I'm very aware of the fact that you can't sit back, watching this movie. You've got to chase it.''

Risky business

Lynch admits that it's not easy to get his bizarre cinematic visions financed, although he blames creative blocks for the five-year gap between the widely reviled ``Fire Walk With Me'' and ``Lost Highway,'' not backlash against the perceived indulgences of that film and the second season of his TV series ``Twin Peaks,'' on which ``Fire Walk'' was based.

Still, Lynch acknowledges that his films are too avant garde to make it through the established Hollywood studio system.

``It's a risky business, and it costs a lot of money to make a film,'' Lynch realizes. ``But when more than one person, even, has to be involved in the process to approve a picture, it narrows the chances for abstractions. But it's not that you just do random abstractions, it's in the context of a story. Some stories allow for more of that than others, and sometimes those films can't be made.

``I, myself, like a story that can hold abstractions,'' Lynch says, for once stating the obvious. ``That has some places to go, deep places where many mental activities are triggered in the viewer. But still a story that's, generally speaking, completely comprehensible.

`` `Lost Highway,' I think, is understandable through intuition, more than intellectually understanding everything. It's a feeling understanding.''

CAPTION(S):

3 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) GETTING `LOST'

Patricia Arquette heads down David Lynch's bizarre `Highway.'

A talk with the director of `Blue Velvet,' `Wild at Heart' and `Twin Peaks,' and his stars

(2) ``For me, it's clearly a story about two people who are fated to live out one of those malignant relationships,'' says Bill Pullman of ``Lost Highway,'' in which he plays a jazz musician who isn't sure whether he has killed his wife.

(3) `Instead of being in trouble myself, I like to go into a world where I can see others in trouble and struggling. I like to meet these characters, knowing that they're going to get themselves in trouble. It's a story thing, but it has to be based on truthful human behavior.'

David Lynch

``Lost Highway'' director.